As might be expected*, the head of Egypt's forensics authority has dismissed as "premature" any suggestion that the small sizes of body parts retrieved since an EgyptAir plane crashed last week indicate there was an explosion on board, either terror-related or an accident.

Human remains retrieved from the site where an Egyptian airliner crashed into the sea suggest that an explosion may have brought down the aircraft, Egyptian forensic officials told news agencies Tuesday.

A security official said they have been arriving at the Cairo morgue forensics' department in an effort to speed up the investigation.

The doomed EgyptAir Flight 804 did not swerve or lose altitude before it disappeared off the radar, the head of Egypt's state-run provider of air navigation services has said.

Last Thursday, EgyptAir flight 804 disappeared from radar screens while flying from Paris to Cairo with 66 people aboard, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French.

The two Canadians on board have been identified as Medhat Tanious of Toronto, and Marwa Hamdy, a Saskatoon native who had moved to Cairo after marrying an Egyptian. Leaked flight data indicated a fault in two of the plane's cockpit windows and that a sensor detected smoke in a lavatory in the final moments of the flight.

Egypt has dispatched a submarine to search for the flight's black boxes.

Egypt's al-Watan newspaper quoted another unnamed forensics official as saying the plane blew up in mid-air, leaving remains "no larger than the size of a hand", but that it has yet to be determined whether an explosive device was to blame. The head of the government's forensic agency says those reports are just "baseless" speculation and "mere assumptions". Adel, however, said EgyptAir had no information about the location of the fuselage, adding that the multinational search team had focused on an area he described was about the size of CT in the USA.

One Greek source close to the investigation said Athens will start sending information on the crash to Egyptian authorities on Wednesday, in response to a request from Egypt's public prosecutor.

A team from the forensic medicine institute went to a Cairo airport hotel yesterday morning to begin gathering DNA samples from family members of the victims.

"When a plane crashes, an explosion takes place at some stage or another, reducing the plane to pieces", one source said.